Word: korda
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
These tips are from Michael Korda's Power! How to Get It, How to Use It (Random House; $8.95). Another current power book, Robert J. Ringer's Winning Through Intimidation (Funk & Wagnalls; $9.95), has some equally keen advice: do not trust anybody at all; assume you will fail, so your positive mental outlook will not be crushed by a setback; make as much money as you can, because life is short and pointless and there is nothing better...
...Korda's book is the more sophisticated of the two. Currently editorial top dog at the book-publishing firm of Simon & Schuster, Korda, 42, updates Adman Shepherd Mead's 1952 book How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and the result could be made into an equally entertaining musical comedy. In Mead's day, the status symbol was a key to the executive washroom. Now, says Korda, it is an IBM Selectric II for your secretary...
...Korda's scenario, the sexes do meet. The "lowlevel satyromania" beneath the chill surface of office life engenders assorted love affairs. But because of the status scramble most liaisons are ersatz. When the colleagues of one executive discovered that contrary to the sly suggestions he liked to make, he was really not sleeping with his pretty secretary, the poor chap felt obliged to fire her and take another job himself. Here, as elsewhere, Korda often chooses an odd example, then proceeds on the assumption that it is some kind of norm. In real life, secretaries are often victimized...
...Korda case involves a woman advertising executive whose superior followed her around to make sure that her clients did not mind her gender. And, of course, he knows a number of women whose promotions were shuffled so they got the work load without the title, the privileges, or the full salary...
Quite apart from the sex war, a reader is appalled by the pinched, gray world of office work that the book describes. Korda makes any number of unwitting condescensions toward women. Perhaps the biggest is his final exhortation to men: "Ask women to join...